Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal has published various left viewpoints from the region on the political situation in Ukraine. These do not necessarily represent the views of the publishers.

August 16, 2014 – Links
International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The war between the Ukraine
government and the republics of Novorossiya [New Russia] is gradually taking on
the character of a positional stand-off. The resources of both sides are
exhausted, and fighting reserves are at an end. For the people’s republics,
defending themselves against the many times larger military forces of the Kiev
regime, the well-known principle of “a government needs to win, but for an
insurrection it is enough not to lose” operates with full force.

The
deteriorating economic situation in Ukraine, the growing demoralisation of
supporters of the Kiev regime and the gradual development of a partisan
movement on government-controlled territory together herald a new phase in a
civil war that will clearly extend far beyond the boundaries of the south-east.

The middle of August marked the failure of the latest
offensive by the government’s army (most likely, the last offensive in Kiev’s
summer campaign). It is significant that during the previous offensive the main
Western mass media, while assiduously denying their readers any real
information about the war, suddenly began running reports of successes by the
government’s army. Just as occurred last time, the optimistic forecasts have
been followed by silence. The failure of the second offensive followed exactly
the same scenario as that of the first: the attacking forces were cut off from
their bases, and finished up surrounded. The virtual victories turned into a
real catastrophe. A war cannot be won in the information space if you are
getting beaten on land.

There might seem to be every reason to speak of positive
prospects for the people’s republics of Novorossiya. But against the background
of military victories a political and administrative crisis is unfolding,
creating new dangers which, if they are not more perilous than those associated
with the attacks by government forces, are no less serious either.

Over several weeks the entire leadership of the Donetsk and
Lugansk republics has effectively been replaced. The most momentous, and
unexpected, development has been the ousting of the military leader of the
militias, Igor Strelkov. In the best Soviet traditions, the announcement was
couched in terms of his “transfer to other work”. The decision was made at a
time when Strelkov was in Moscow, far from his troops.

Strelkov’s removal from his post is an obvious act of
revenge on the part of those very Kremlin forces on whom the leader of the
militias had inflicted a serious political defeat in early July. Militia units,
after conducting a heroic two-month defence of Slavyansk, had broken through
encircling Ukrainian forces and made their way to Donetsk, where political
figures linked to the Kremlin were already planning to surrender the city to
the Kiev government. The arrival of the militias was accompanied by a radical
purge in the structures of power. No one repressed the conspirators, but all
were forced one after another to sign letters of resignation. They then left
the city without excessive fuss, some of them setting off for Moscow and others
for Kiev. This occurred against a background of growing political
radicalisation within the movement. In August, a joint letter had been
published by rank-and-file militia fighters demanding that the slogan of
“social republics” that had been proclaimed in Donetsk and Lugansk should be
put into effect, that the property of oligarchs should be nationalised and that
reforms should be enacted in the interests of workers. The post of chair of the
Supreme Soviet was taken by Boris Litvinov, a communist who had broken with the
official leadership of the party. A law was adopted reversing the
commercialisation of health care that had been initiated by the previous
leaders, and recurrent, though somewhat timid, attempts were made at
nationalisation.

For their part, political specialists close to the Kremlin unleashed
a campaign against Strelkov in the Russian mass media. The bitterness of the
Moscow bureaucrats and their propaganda assistants is understandable: while
they were sitting in their cosy offices, drawing up plans and weaving
intrigues, the people at the forefront of events were making history without
asking their advice.

Paradoxically, it was Strelkov who did most to aid the
radicalisation of the process, despite his sympathies for the pre-revolutionary
monarchy and nostalgia for the Russian empire. The leader of the militias was not
only famed for his honesty and openness (it is enough to recall his detailed
accounts of his own difficulties and failures, accounts which contrast sharply
with the propaganda from Moscow and Kiev). Strelkov’s political instincts drove
him, to a large degree despite his own ideological leanings, to support social
and political changes. He and his associates stressed repeatedly that they
would not allow Novorossiya to be transformed into a second edition of
pre-Maidan Ukraine, directly contradicting the strategy of the Kremlin, which
sought precisely that.

Unlike other Donetsk and Lugansk leaders, who travelled
constantly to Moscow to beg for assistance (for the most part in vain), the
commander of the militias was to be found with his troops in the line of battle.
There, as practice showed, it was safer for him politically than in the Moscow
corridors of power.

How Strelkov was lured to Moscow, and what was done to him
there in order to extract from him his “voluntary” resignation (if in fact he signed
such a statement at all), we can only guess. He may have been threatened with a
complete halt to Russian supplies to the liberated territories of Novorossiya.
To a substantial degree, this dependency of the people’s republics on outside supplies
is a result of inept management by the people whom Strelkov removed from their
posts in July and early August – they were unable, or refused, to organise the
economy in the rear, and to ensure the normal distribution of resources. By
August a situation had arisen in which the republics were threatened with
disaster unless shipments of food and ammunition were brought from Russia. More
than likely, it was this lever that was used by the Kremlin intriguers to get
rid of Strelkov.

One way or another, the conservative forces took their
revenge, and the Donetsk military leader was removed. People suspected of links
to the oligarchs were appointed to a series of key posts. In Moscow during
these very days the Ukrainian politician Oleg Tsarev, representing no one and
driven out of Donetsk by the militia fighters, unfurled a “new flag of
Novorossiya”. For some reason this was an upside-down version of the old
imperial banner, and was obviously meant as a counterbalance to the flag, dark
red with a cross of St Andrew, under which the militia are fighting.

The Russian press is already reporting openly on an
agreement reached between the Moscow bureaucrats and the Ukrainian oligarch
Rinat Akhmetov. In the best traditions of the ancien régime, the Kremlin bureaucracy has decided to sacrifice the
liberated territories to its new vassal, in exchange for his services as a
mediator in its relations with Kiev and prospectively, the West. At the same
time, contacts are being revived between Russian and Ukrainian diplomats, and
lively discussions are under way on the ultimate fate of the south-east. After
the failure of its latest offensive, and faced with growing internal
difficulties, Kiev might well be ready to strike a deal.

The only thing the authors of this scenario have not taken
into account is the thinking of the people of Novorossiya and Ukraine, along
with the moods of Donetsk residents and the overall logic of a revolutionary
process into which Russian society too is gradually being drawn. The militia
fighters and activists who, beneath the bombs, are constructing a new state are
no longer prepared to be docile agents of outside decision making, no matter
where, in Moscow or Kiev, the decisions alien to their interests are being
taken. In Novorossiya, the idealistic sympathies with an abstract Russia that
characterised the first months of the uprising are now being replaced by a
growing hatred for the Kremlin bureaucrats, whom supporters of the republics
accuse of sabotage and treason. The same moods are growing, in the fashion of
an avalanche, within Russia itself. As for Igor Strelkov, a new group of field
commanders is taking his place, in many ways accepting him as an example but
differing from him in their far more radical and left-wing views.

Through apparatus intrigues, blackmail and manipulation, it
may be possible to achieve tactical successes, and to banish one or another
figure from the leadership. But it will not be possible to stop the
revolutionary crisis whose development is now gathering strength.